We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful, to better understand how they are used and to tailor advertising. You can read more and make your cookie choices here. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

5 Questions to Consider When Building Your Campaign Strategy

Good news! You can connect your Pardot and Salesforce campaigns to work together. Why, you ask? To build an efficient, cohesive campaign strategy that goes beyond the traditional marketing and sales silos. What’s more, connected campaigns are the way of the future — you will get the most out of your Pardot Lightning App by using this great feature. Think about it, your marketing and sales teams are working toward the same goal, so why shouldn’t they be up to speed on what’s going on on the other side?

Using Pardot and Salesforce in conjunction will help you build a strong marketing strategy that will empower your marketing team, inform your sales team, and give you all the tools you need to do it over and over again.

Here are five questions to consider as you start building out your campaign strategy.

1. How do you market?

This one is easy — what are your most successful marketing initiatives? Do you host many webinars? Are your prospects keen to attend your next event? Think about what you do most often and what has been most successful for your audience. This is a good opportunity to look back and weed out efforts that just haven’t worked. The efforts that do work will be the building blocks for your campaign strategy. You will want to create a campaign record for each one.

Keep in mind, there will be other things to consider. For example, you may want to roll your campaigns into hierarchies, or build campaign templates to reuse later. However, in this planning stage, you’ll just want to identify what kinds of campaigns you will be creating.

2. What happens during your campaign?

Now that you have your campaign types identified, let’s consider what may happen throughout the duration of your campaign. This starts with you — are you sending an email or targeting a prospect segment with a social media ad? Then it moves on to your prospects. How are the interacting with your promotional materials? Can they register for your event? Then, will they attend or decline? Outlining the full picture of every possible outcome will help you determine what kinds of member statuses you will want to include for your campaigns. Think of member statuses as steps in a process — your sales team already has a similar process in the form of opportunity stages, now it’s time for you to do the same!

You will notice that Salesforce campaigns come with two default statuses — Sent and Responded. There is also the Pardot-specific status of “Connected” that is applied when a campaign member is synced from a connected campaign upon their first touch. However, these default statuses will most likely not suffice for all of your campaign types, so we highly recommend that you create your own custom statuses.

Here is an example of what a series of statuses may look like for a webinar campaign:

Invited > Registered > Attended > Did Not Attend

Quick Tip: Have one set of statuses for each campaign type! For example, if using the statuses above for one webinar, use it for ALL webinars.

3. How do you measure success?

As you plan your campaigns, you probably have a desired outcome for each one. In the example above the ideal outcome for any invited prospect is that they attend your webinar. Campaign records have a built-in gauge for success.

Remember when we talked about those default member statuses, Sent and Responded? In very basic terms, if you send something, you hope for a response. In the case of these default statuses, Responded is the successful outcome. If you add your own custom member statuses, you can actually specify which one of them is your marker of success — note that this will still be called the “Responded” value even if it requires no actual response from your prospects.

Why do this? Well, when your campaign members hit that success status, it reflects on the overall performance of your campaign. You can actually see how many campaign members “responded” and report on that number.

4. Where does your sales team feature?

It’s very common for marketing and sales teams to work in their own individual spaces with very little overlap, however this breeds confusion and causes a disconnect. By bringing your campaign management into Salesforce, you are automatically creating a more collaborative environment, but there are additional ways to bring your sales team in and build a more successful process.

First, by encouraging your sales team to always use contact roles, you are ensuring that campaign influence attribution works as expected. Remember, campaign influence is determined when an individual is a campaign member first, then a contact role on an opportunity. This is how Salesforce is able to link dollars earned in an opportunity with dollars spent on a campaign.

5. How do you report on your marketing activities?

Finally, think about your reporting structure. Do you currently report on your marketing efforts? Who has access to those reports and are they effective? By connecting your campaigns, you are paving the way for powerful, effective reporting on your campaigns.

Report on the effectiveness of your campaigns by using the standard Customizable Campaign Influence reports. You can also utilize Engagement History (generally available with the Spring ’19 release) to get even more granular reporting on your individual marketing assets and how they relate to your overall campaign success.

Want more help with campaigns? Check out our Complete Guide to Campaigns! Whether you are just starting out with campaigns or trying to refresh what’s already been built, thinking through these five important questions will get you on track for a killer marketing strategy!